Monday, September 19, 2016

Directed by
the legendary Akira Kurosawa in 1954, Seven Samurai was a
groundbreaking film which had a profound influence on the evolution
of cinema for generations to come. Superficially, that seminal work
merely reads like a martial arts epic set in 16th Century Japan. Yet,
over the years, it has spawned a cottage industry of knockoffs
trading in the picture's novel narrative revolving around a rag-tag
team of selfless heroes recruited in service of some lofty goal. In 1960,
Seven Samurai was remade as The Magnificent Seven, a sprawling
Western co-starring Steve McQueen, Yul Brynner, Charles Bronson, Eli
Wallach, Robert Vaughn and James Coburn. Today, that classic has been
refreshed by Antoine Fuqua in an outing reuniting the director with
Denzel Washington following successful collaborations on The
Equalizer (2014) and Training Day (2001) for which the latter won an
Academy Award. This
incarnation of The Magnificent Seven does feature a few variations on
the theme. For example, the picture's dastardly bad guy is now an
avaricious white man intent on seizing a mining town's gold instead
of a Mexican bandito simply staging a series of border raids. And the
good guys enlisted to engage the greedy gringo are a
politically-correct, rainbow coalition reflecting every ethnicity. Otherwise,
the essence of the original plot remains intact. As the film unfolds,
we find the folks in the frontier settlement of Rose Creek living in
fear of Bartholomew Bogue and his gang of marauders. Bogue is your
stereotypical, bloodthirsty villain, straight out of central casting,
played to perfection by Peter Sarsgaard. It is
established early on just how low the diabolical Bogue will stoop to
achieve his evil ends, between murdering an innocent woman and
burning the church to the ground. That makes the arrival of bounty
hunter Sam Chisolm (Washington) all the more welcome by the time the
exasperated and intimidated local yokels are at their collective
wit's end. They also
have no idea that Chisolm isn't merely motivated by altruism but has
his own revenge-fueled reason to tangle with Bogue. Regardless, once
deputized, the gunslinger proceeds to assemble a motley crew composed
of a Civil War vet suffering from shell shock (Ethan Hawke), a
hard-drinking bombmaker (Chris Pratt), a gruff mountain man (Vincent
D'Onofrio), a Chicano outlaw (Manuel
Garcia-Rulfo), a crack Comanche archer (Martin Sensmeier) and a
knife-throwing, Asian assassin (Byung-hun Lee). Don't
expect any deeply-developed characters and you won't be disappointed.
It's all about the inexorable march to the big showdown during which
the heroes will obviously even the score, and then some. The Wild,
Wild West revisited as an ethnically-diverse fantasy land Hollywood
has never imagined before!

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The Sly Fox Film Reviews

KamWilliams.com

The Sly Fox Film Reviews publishes the content of film critic Kam Williams. Voted Most Outstanding Journalist of the Decade by the Disilgold Soul Literary Review in 2008, Kam Williams is a syndicated film and book critic who writes for 100+ publications around the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, Canada and the Caribbean. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Online, the NAACP Image Awards Nominating Committee and Rotten Tomatoes.

In addition to a BA in Black Studies from Cornell, he has an MA in English from Brown, an MBA from The Wharton School, and a JD from Boston University. Kam lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and son.